“A glance at the Collective Reparation Program in Colombia: Between assistance, resistance and achieving justice”

DSA Ireland Annual Conference 2016:

‘Beyond Aid? Innovative Models for Achieve Justice’

24-25 November, 2016

Dublin, Ireland

Alejandro Valderrama HerreraNational University of Colombia

AnthropologistIndependent Consultant

alejovaldo@yahoo.es

Number of People living in Conflict-affected areasand with Humanitarian Assistance

¿where is the conflict running and the reparation process

implemented?

FARC ARMED PRESENCE

NUMBER OF IDPs BY CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE 2015

Areas of highest density of abandonment and dispossession of land

Reparations and inclusion or inclusion through reparations: The size of the problem

The Government responds to armed conflict victims’ rights throughthe Victim´s Law and Land Restitution (2011) to provide legal andmaterial reparations in such cases and victim recognition in the peaceagreement. Measures of assistance, care, reparation (collective andindividual) and restitution land rights are issued as a transitional justiceprocess, involving communities and institutions in a big challenge forthe implementation, with a new big bureaucracy, technical andjuridical processes that these imply.

Almost 50% are women and children; almost the 15% of theColombian population requires reparation and this exceeds thecurrently allocated economic and technical resources; particularly inthe most vulnerable areas in a scenario post FARC agreements.

(Next Map)

How do reparations play an important role in this process of deconstructing /

reconstructing collective identities, peasant and ethnic identities from the axis of victim

citizenship or citizenship in order to get redress?

From IDPs to victims and the politic economic framework

Lemaitre J.; Bergtora K. (2015), address the gap in the legal mobilizationliterature by exploring the impact of violent contexts on legal mobilization,adapting three concepts commonly used to explain collective action: frames,resources, and almost dangerous political opportunities. They also describehow in violent contexts mobilisation frames are unstable and constantlyshifting.

Resources tend to vanish and political opportunities imply a significant riskand physical danger, in the specific IDP´s processes (Law 387, 1997) to victims(Law 1448, 2011), opening the way from the communities vision and theenforceability of the rights.

The move from the humanitarian assistance focus to a reparation focus

How some local communities had made this transition fromdisplacement identities to victims’ identities; the implications ofthe legal mobilisation as a grassroots organisations in violentcontexts; the move from the humanitarian assistance focus to areparation focus, changing the way in which the people defendand negotiate their owns rights in daily life, the generation ofsocial mobilisation and reconstruction of the social fabric in theirterritories.

Therefore it is clear to see how communities and organizationsare between an assistance based-model, the resistance to theeconomic extractivist model and trying to achieving justiceconstantly adopting the shifting framework.

SOME VOICES….

“[…] We are not only victims, we are farmers, workers, parents, leaders….Access to political power may have been a fundamental source of violent conflict, it will generate conflict rather than alleviate it…”

“[…]The reparation is being handled as a favor, and not from an approach of guaranteeing rights, so that "give" what they want and how they want, regardless actually the differential approach, the needs and involvement of people which they are included . What happens is that by having their immediate needs addressed, some indigenous are compelled to accept these "favors", which eventually involves following the game[…]”

“[…]What about the people who stay in our territories? We want our territory for the future of our generations. Multinationals want to come in to our territories. if there are not empowered communities, we will lose a lot and again we will be displaced. Each project must contribute to empowerment, projects are not only circumstantial. Our experience demonstrated that displaced persons may prefer compensation than to return to a hostile environment […]”

“[…]The only choice to survive is to negotiate, to try to recover what we lost and not lose anything else[...]”

The State takes us as symbolic expectant actors, but don´t have the ability to actually intervene. Participation in the media of these victims is just to show and be mentioned as we participated […] that’s just a smokescreen from the state, it is pure publicity to demonstrate that the state is doing actions. They themselves violate the laws that they enact […]”.

Territorial intervention 2014

Current mining concessions

Applications pending

Permit applications for mining proposals

Map 5 Permit applications for mining proposals

FARC CONCENTRATION ZONES FOR THE

PEACE PROCESS –23 JUNE 2016

I would like to highlight some points:

First, Communities, land claimants and HRD in general face insecurity because the continuingstruggles among armed groups for local and regional power are linked with the political andeconomic interest.

Second, contradictions exist between development policies, reparation and restitution policies.There is a gap in the study of the relations between land policy in Colombia, postconflict andTransitional Justice. Land policy plays a significant role in our so-call postconflict, increasing the riskof conflict reproduction. A further aspect which must be addressed to consider the precise role ofeconomic factors in creating and perpetuating conflicts. Restitution has become a big challenge.

Third, the regional challenges of the reparation process and peacebuilding includes one of the mostimportant: land restitution. Restitution in Colombia has a questioned nature, which includes thestruggles between local, regional and national political and economic elites.

In the last three years, the government, academia, the economic sector and social organizationshave undertaken work to pay off the historic debt to the rural sector through the Mission for thetransformation of the Agrarian Sector.

The new framework of land policy challenges and highlights the importance of contextual analysisfor the design of land policy before and after the peace agreements.

Fourth, Restitution relates to techniques of governmentality. The state regulates tomitigate negative impacts and maximize opportunities in the land acquisitions. Inother words, how the state updates, articulates and incorporates hard and softmethods, where subtle forms, less apparent and invisible violence are integratedwith more direct and open violence, together with the massacres, dispossessionand coercion, have been used and continue to use paternalistic ways of"colonization of the soul" or coaptation of hope; which in the case of Bolivia, calls(re)covert violence, in Rivera´s words (2010), a benefactress logic withimperceptible effects that produce and reproduce exclusion in everyday existence.

Without a proper Census (the last was in 2005 and the last Agrarian Census after 40years was in 2014), peasant and ethnic-based land rights challenged to identify therights beneficiaries. Especially victims of forced displacement and dispossession orforced abandonment of lands and territories, in terms of access to property rights,displaced and widowed women have in the past often faced difficulties as theywere usually not included as co-owners of the property.

Fifth: Centralism in the sense of how the state has managed the creation of spaces fordialogue between the civil population, civil society organizations and central institutions,but it is virtually impossible to talk about territorial peace if the way the central state isrelated to the regions continues.

There is a lack of capacity in the rural territories. The State talks about territorial peace butthere is an absence of social policy in the territories. A Peacebuilding approach from thestate as top-down process failed to properly engage the grassroots. Changing this isimportant to strengthen the relation intervention and statebuilding.

There are two conceptualizations of the territory, the notion of territory for Indigenous,Afrocolombian and Peasants, which is their life itself vs. the geometric territory of theState as a mechanism of segregation and control, resulting in identification techniques,control of production and ethnic identities.

In our workshops, personal interviews and visits to their territories, they highlightthe following points: Autonomy; Participation; Institutionality; Territoriality andlocal productivity; and Political Action.

Finally, Individuals and collectives use singular negotiation strategies as an everydayresistance to survive: with the government and companies (case FPIC or theelaboration of the Reparations Plans) and coordinate with others legal and illegalorganisations, which reveal the permanent reconfigurations of their territories.

The relationship between State and companies, has imposed logics andadministrative changes in land rights ownership and in everyday life ; communitiescoexist in the territories with this corporate and state action, linked to the actions oflegal and illegal armed groups, awareness in a greater or lesser degree anacceptance threshold, communities run between what is negotiable and what isnot; without an appropriate social responsibility strategies of business and humanrights.

Challenges

-The greatest challenges in terms of compensating victims are the low efficiency of thejudicial system, persistent threats against victims’ rights campaigners and land restitution,the difficulties in assuring land restitution and actual land policy. Moreover, individualand communal monetary reparations for more than eight million victims represent amajor financial challenge for the state.

-Currently, the programme is implementing a differential approach (gender, ethnic andsocial organization reparations) that aims to attend to the particular needs of certaingroups. Although Colombia has greatly improved in terms of inclusion and progressivelegislation, it is an inclusion without real representation.

-It is important to focus on territorial transitions in the implementation of theagreements. The implementation of the peace process claims to work on the territorialaspects of the agreements.

-There is a several territories who received the impact of the transformations andtransitions from the armed conflict situation to the call posconflict, and that it´s meanthe process of normalization of the territories and the change from the control of thearmed groups in some cases to the autonomy of the communities in the way ofparticipation and the regulation of their own life’s and the ways of organising the localframes in a territorial aspects; for example: who is going to control the local economies(included the illegal); the daily life, community organisation, participation.

Challenges

-Fundamental aspects that Colombia should focus on to ensure equality are pointed out:the big gap between policies that guarantee the rights of victims and their application(especially at regional and local level), the persistence of armed conflict and thesignificant gap that persists in leadership in economic and political public spheres.

-Land grabbing in Colombia is not only an example of violent dispossession in a country atwar, but more generally a historical reconfiguration of the relations between the state,national territories, the local and regional political elites, legal and illegal economic actorsand the free market.

-This illustrates how social struggles against land grabbing can be interpreted as acomplex entanglement and collision between regulatory regimes that seek to guaranteeHuman Rights and promote development policies (agrobusiness, mining, infrastructure)under the Colombian armed conflict. In this respect a greater coherence betweenIntegrate local development and development policies, is needed in order to do this.

-Land monopolization and its repercussions on security, sovereignty, and food autonomy.Land-use management, access, land tenancy, and land reformation in Colombia.

Challenges

-Integrating local development and development policies.

-The importance of equality and the empowerment of the grassroots organistions inpost-conflict and their fundamental role in the reconstruction and the recovering ofconflict. Ensuring gender equality, particularly in conflict-affected areas, is anadditional challenge.

-The opportunity to frame the interest of communities more from the Economic,Social and Cultural (ESC) rights than the politics and civil rights, center in truth, justiceand reparations- than a structural causes of conflict, the specific vulnerabilities shouldbe based on transformative justice more than in a restaurative and not only in amonetary compensation.

-The Human Rights framework is a powerful instrument to articulate the multipledimensions of justice in defense of the multiple dimensions of livelihoods threatenedby the expansion of extractives economies. However, the emancipatory potential ofhuman rights politics depends on how the human rights framework is applied,interpreted and constructed in intercultural contexts.

Challenges

-Violations of ESC rights can have a devastating effect, often extending over severalgenerations, as victims are denied educational and health services, social protection,cultural and traditional activities and loose the opportunities of productivity. Theviolations of these rights have until recently not been central to the agenda ofTransitional Justice.

-The paradox of being a subject in permanent transition in relation to their territories,since the displacement, through the confinement, restitution and resettlement inareas where they should continue to manage and negotiate their conditions ofexistence for dignity as political subjects.

THANKS TO THE COMMUNITIES AND

THANK YOU!